


Shipping Wars in the Arctic

by seleneheart



Category: due South
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canada, Blanket Permission, Canada is the only superpower left, Community: ds_flashfiction, Future Fic, Global Warming, M/M, Near Future, POV Outsider, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-08-17
Packaged: 2020-09-06 02:23:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20283823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seleneheart/pseuds/seleneheart
Summary: Fraser and Kowalski disappeared into the mists and airs at the top of the world, and were never heard from again.





	Shipping Wars in the Arctic

**Author's Note:**

> Ambiguous ending; takes place late in the 21st century. Henry Hudson was subject to a mutiny by his crew in 1611 and was cast adrift in James Bay; his remains have never been found. Francis Crozier was the captain of the _Terror_, the second ship in Franklin’s expedition. _Unsolved Mysteries of Nunavut_ is a book that doesn’t actually exist (yet). This fic references three other fandoms, if you catch it. ;) Beta by uisgich

“What are you reading?” Duncan Callahan inquired as he plunked a cup of coffee in front of Caleb’s nose, and then took a seat opposite him at the small table.

Caleb showed him the headline, _Shipping War In Arctic Heats Up_. “They say the sea ice won’t block the shipping lanes this winter.”

“Inland revenue should be delighted.” 

“Don’t look so smug, Dunc.”

Duncan shrugged, taking a sip of his own brew. “I can’t help it if your country lost the climate change war. I’m proud that Canada is the only superpower still standing. And that Manitoba is the breadbasket of the world instead of Kansas.”

He pointed his coffee cup at his companion, “And seeing as you’re being paid by His Majesty’s government, you should be properly grateful.”

“Hmm,” Caleb responded absently.

“Cale. I was teasing, you know that.”

Caleb looked up, puzzled. “Of course.”

“Then why are you so . . .” Duncan waved his hand. “Melancholy?”

Caleb sighed. “If all the ice goes away, we won’t have any mysteries left. As you and I deal in mysteries, I would think you’d be concerned.”

A group of undergraduate girls invaded the coffee shop, their excited chattering reminding Caleb of a dawn chorus of birds. Their gazes slid over him without pausing, only to get caught on Duncan. Caleb was well aware that next to his friend, he wasn’t much to look at, thick glasses, short and slight with a runner’s build and messy blonde hair. On the other hand, Duncan was broad and rugged, wavy brown hair and perpetual stubble. Every centimeter a perfect specimen of Canadian manhood, although his exercise tended more towards the outdoors than hockey. 

They had been friends since freshman biology class when Duncan had stumbled in to lecture, late and hungover, and blatantly copied Caleb’s notes. As opposed to his physical features, Duncan defied the polite Canadian stereotype; he was rude and impatient, and punctuality was not a word in Duncan’s lexicon. 

They had both been at the University of Florida to study archeology, with dreams of diving shipwrecks for gold. Caleb had gradually drifted towards cultural anthropology, while Duncan had settled on Arctic archaeology, deciding he would return to Canada once he finished college in the States. 

Of course, with most of Florida underwater these days, all the archaeology in Florida required a diving certification.

They went their separate ways after undergraduate, but now both were post-doctoral, and with the situation in the United States so antithetical to scholarship Caleb hadn’t been able to find a position. Meanwhile, Duncan was working at the University of British Columbia, and when they had been looking for a cultural anthropologist to teach intro classes, Duncan had pushed Caleb’s name forward. 

The girls gathered up their orders en masse and headed for the door. One of them paused by their table. 

“Oh! Professor Callahan, I didn’t see you there. How are you?”

“Fine,” Duncan replied, not bothering to hide his confusion at the question. 

She was tall and tanned, a fall of thick blonde hair spread over her shoulders. Duncan didn’t react at all to her, which puzzled Caleb to no end. Even if he knew better than to do anything about her clear interest, Duncan should have at least reacted to her admiration. 

“I’m doing well,” she continued, as if Duncan had asked the return question. “I’m looking forward to your lecture tomorrow.”

“I can’t imagine why. Polar diatom forms are the most boring topic ever invented.”

The girl was clearly confused by Duncan’s refusal to follow any sort of socially acceptable script for the encounter, not even basic Canadian politeness. Caleb rolled his eyes internally. If he didn’t know better, he would have thought his friend was ace, but he knew quite well that Duncan slept with whoever took his fancy at the moment. He had never bothered to hide his activities, although he was careful to keep clear boundaries with students. Caleb had had his fair share of lovers, but he had to work harder at it. No one ever just tumbled onto his bed the way they did for Duncan.

“Well. Goodbye.” 

A gust of cold air accompanied the girls’ exit from the shop. Spring hadn’t quite gained a foothold even though it had officially arrived at the end of January. 

“What were we talking about? Oh yes, the lack of mystery in your life.”

“I mean it, Dunc,” Caleb replied. “Everything is being found. That guy in the plane off Greenland. Even Franklin isn’t a mystery anymore once the ice retreated enough to find the _Erebus_ and the _Terror_.”

“It’ll make my job so much easier.”

Caleb snorted. “You’ll be called out every time hikers stumble across a missing trapper. What about the important ones? What if someone finds Henry Hudson and just strips his corpse?”

Duncan eyed him for a long moment, his attention firmly fixed on Caleb, who ducked his head, unwilling to expose his thoughts. 

“Is this about the Mountie again?” he asked finally, his voice gentle, which made Caleb cringe. You talked that way to people out on ledges. “I should never have given you that book.”

Caleb gave his friend an amused smile, well aware that the book in question had been an impulse buy while Duncan was wandering bored around the Yellowknife airport on the way home from an expedition. Caleb doubted that he had even thumbed through it, but had purchased it based on the lurid cover featuring absurdly colored aurora. Duncan couldn’t have known that the pages contained an account of one Benton Fraser, a constable with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and his partner, Stanley Kowalski, a Chicago police detective, and their quest to find the remnants of the Franklin Expedition. 

Many people had searched for Franklin over the years, and lost their lives doing it, but none of them had captured Caleb’s imagination the way the tale of Fraser and Kowalski had. They were an unlikely pair of polar explorers, both policemen, and one of them city-bred. Fraser had been raised in the far north, but even the most experienced outdoorsman can make a mistake, and in the extreme environment that was Nunavut in the late twentieth century, one mistake could be fatal. 

In any case, Fraser and Kowalski had disappeared into the mists and airs at the top of the world, and were never heard from again.

Tracing a pattern in the condensation on the table, and ignoring the fact that _Unsolved Mysteries of Nunavut_ currently resided in a pocket of his backpack, Caleb answered, “I’m thinking about writing a book.”

“With what thesis?” Duncan snorted, gentleness evaporating. “This isn’t like your theory that Francis Crozier married some Inuit woman and lived happily ever after with babies. The Mountie and his partner were just another casualty of the Arctic.”

Abruptly Caleb stood up, shouldering his backpack. “Let’s walk down to the pond. It’s too noisy in here.”

Duncan didn’t argue or ask further questions, just picked up his coffee and slipped his own pack onto his shoulders. 

Caleb was grateful to have a job at all, when so many scholars in the States were out of work with the economic collapse of the American system. However, reuniting with Duncan brought so many feelings to the surface that he usually managed to repress. He’d never met anyone so adept at deliberately not seeing things. At this point it was probably habit more than anything else, a defense mechanism to keep him out of trouble. Like those girls in the coffee shop earlier. The obtuseness made it difficult for Caleb to get any sort of read on his friend in regards to them starting a romantic relationship. At this point, they were probably too far into the friend zone to change things.

When they reached the far side of the pond, and Caleb could feel Duncan’s impatience ramping to the explosive point, he said, “I think it was a romance.”

“What? Why?”

“Why would they go on such a ridiculous expedition?” Caleb countered. “They were both national heroes, could have had any job they cared to name on either side of the border. Why go look for Franklin?”

“Because they were bugshit crazy,” Duncan muttered. “Besides, if they did survive their expedition, they’re long dead now. It was nearly a century ago when they captured Muldoon. You’ll never find sufficient evidence to write anything scholarly.”

“I’ve read Sergeant Frobisher’s journals,” Caleb said. “He was a well-decorated Mountie, served over fifty years. Left his journals to the RCMP after his death. I’ve seen them.”

“How’d you manage that?” Duncan wondered.

“I dropped your name to the RCMP archivist.”

“Ah. Lydia. Lovely woman.”

“Yes, luckily she remembers you fondly. Anyway, textual evidence is my purview, as you well know.”

“How is Frobisher relevant?” 

“He geared them up for the hunt for Franklin.”

“You mean to tell me that Frobisher confirmed that they were lovers? That seems unlikely.”

“Of course not. It was the end of the twentieth century. Fraser and Kowalski worked for organizations not known for their tolerance of homosexual relationships.”

“You’re still theorizing, then.”

“Did you know that Frobisher and Robert Fraser once competed for the affections of the same woman? She ended up marrying Fraser.”

“Spicy,” Duncan leered.

Caleb rolled his eyes. “The point is . . . Frobisher went into detail about the competition with Robert Fraser in his journals when he was recording the capture of Muldoon. The timing of the story is odd, considering it was nearly forty years earlier.”

“That’s nearly nothing,” Duncan objected.

“Reading between the lines . . .”

Duncan made a disgusted noise, his opinion about inferences from text extremely low. “You know what’s _between the lines?_ Nothing.”

“Yes, but. Frobisher went on and on about how partnership is like a marriage. He directly compared Caroline Fraser to Ray Kowalski. He says things such as _much like Caroline, Kowalski this; Kowalski did this just like Caroline that_. In every instance, he correlates the known love interest of one Fraser man to the presumed love interest of another.”

“That isn’t enough to hang a whole book on. Unless you mean for it to be fiction. _Two guys and their wolf settle down together amongst the natives in the frozen north._ That trope happens only in pop culture.”

“No, I mean to verify it.”

“How?” Duncan expostulated. “As you’ve already noted, that kind of thing wouldn’t be recorded anywhere.”

“Not directly,” Caleb agreed. “But there’s other types of evidence. Inferences. Sales receipts, tax rolls, construction permits. All of them could be evidence of two men settling together in some remote location.”

“Of which there are a fuckton in northern Canada. Without knowing a specific region, you could spend the rest of your life accessing town records.”

“There’s oral history,” Caleb offered carefully, aware that Duncan could derail his plans if he tried hard enough.

“Oral history is just that - oral. As in, not written down.”

“Don’t patronize me. I plan to go ask.”

“No!”

“Fraser was raised among the Inuit. If he went back there, they would note it. And it’s not _that_ many generations ago.”

“I repeat ‘No’. You can’t go to the _Arctic_!”

“Why not? I haven’t filed for my summer sabbatical yet. There’s direct flights to Baker’s Lake from here. Then I just have to get them to talk to me.”

“Because it’s the fucking Arctic,” Duncan yelled. “Yes, it’s warmer, but it’s still the top of the Earth. Maybe it’s officially springtime now but it’s fucking _dark_ still. The water might be warmer but the land isn’t. And rotten ice is the worst kind of ice.”

He raked his hand through his hair in agitation, leaving it in a disarray that Caleb longed to rectify. 

“You have no clue what you’re doing out there,” Duncan said.

Caleb ignored the implied insult to his outdoor skills. “I’ve done field work before. Don’t act like all I do is read about it.”

“But not there! If text is your area of expertise, then the Arctic is mine. You have no idea what you’re in for.”

“Then come with me,” Caleb said, playing his trump card.

~~~

“So that’s it then.” 

“You have your answer,” Duncan said. 

“Yeah.”

“I thought you’d be happier.”

Caleb sighed. “Another mystery no longer a mystery. The world loses something every time.”

The wind whipped the fur-lined edge of his parka into his eyes. Duncan reached out and smoothed the fibers away, but his fingers lingered.

“I don’t get it,” Caleb complained, aware of his peevish tone. “If they were just going to hide out in the frozen north, why search for Franklin? I would say that was just a ruse, but all available evidence points to them making the attempt. It’s fucking ridiculous. The only thing worse than that idea was the actual Franklin expedition. Does everyone even tangentially involved with it get hit with the stupid stick?”

Duncan replied, his tone serious, “I think sometimes you look for one thing, but you find something else. Something you weren’t expecting. But you couldn’t have found it if you hadn’t been searching for the other thing. The search itself is the quest.”

Finally registering what Duncan’s fingers were doing to his hair, Caleb looked up at his friend, cursing his autonomous nervous system for dilating his pupils without his permission. He whispered, “Dunc. What . . . ?”

“Cale.” 

Duncan looked tormented, and Caleb would feel smug, but he was too busy grabbing the sides of Duncan’s hood and dragging his head down.

“Fucking finally,” he said just as their lips met.

They fit together physically as easily as their friendship had bloomed. 

“I love you, Cale,” Duncan murmured against his mouth.

“You are the biggest idiot I’ve ever met and I can’t believe I’ve been in love with you for half my life.”

“How about you berate me somewhere more enclosed and more horizontal?” Duncan suggested with a nip to Caleb’s chin.

“Maybe I’ll turn all of this into a novel,” Caleb mused, because he wasn’t above being a shit about things.

Caleb had never heard Duncan make such a guttural noise before. It sent a thrill of heat up his spine. He allowed himself to be steered back to their vehicle. 

“I need to get my notes in order.”

“Cale . . .” Duncan growled.

“Then you can do whatever you want with me,” Caleb continued. 

“Oh, I have so many plans for you. You have no idea.”

Arm in arm, they walked away from the small, wind-swept cairn of rocks.


End file.
